Animated graphics add life to your Web site. You can create a variety of lively animated GIFs in Fireworks, including banner ads, logos, and cartoons.
An animated GIF is a series of still images that appear quickly in succession, which creates the illusion of an image in motion. When you build an animation in Fireworks, you place each image in a separate frame. All of the images of an animation are exported to an animated GIF file. In Fireworks, you can open and edit existing animated GIFs, or create new animated GIFs.
By gradually changing the content of successive frames, you can make an object appear to move across the canvas, get bigger or smaller, rotate, change color, fade in or out, or change shape. You can use these and other techniques to put together a sophisticated animation that tells an entire story or depicts a realistically moving object, such as a cartoon character, animal, or automobile.
To greatly simplify animation, you can convert to symbols those objects that appear in multiple frames in the animation. To create intermediate steps in the location, transformation, or effect of an object, you can use a process called tweening, which automatically draws the intermediate objects and distributes them to frames.